Rolf Elmér, CEO of Avail Intelligence, is a 1990 graduate of Lund University who received an MBA from Stockholm School of Economics in 2003. He also holds a PhD in high-energy nuclear physics from the Division of Cosmic and Subatomic Physics at Lund University since 1996.

Could you describe the difference between your optimization solutions Customer Interaction Broker, Landing Page Optimizer, and Navigation Predictor?

Easy! The Avail eMarketing Suite consists of five different modules, each made for different parts of the customer interaction cycle on a website.

Starting from the landing page, which is the first page a new visitor sees, Landing Page Optimizer makes it possible to make the first page adaptive and automatically tailor-made to show the most relevant products based on the search word the visitor entered at external search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You could compare it to a bricks-and-mortar store with the ability to change and adapt the storefront as you approach the entrance.

Needless to say, a lot of companies spend huge amounts of money today to create special landing pages for each sponsored search word or campaign.

Navigation Predictor then helps the customer during the shopping process and presents the most relevant products, offerings, or creatives based on the customer’s browsing behavior, what they put in their basket, or previous transaction history. For the eCommerce site, this optimizes sales at each interaction point with the customer on the site.

Customer Interaction Broker uses explicit user-generated content to create trust and confidence in the shopping process. A good example is Ellos.se, where important customer feedback is captured and forwarded to product managers and where customers can share product experiences.

Navigation Predictor can recommend additional products or offerings to the customer based on My Favorites or wish lists.

We have seen the use of many methodologies for online optimization: Taguchi, choice modeling, optimal design, etc. What methodology do you use?

Our core technology is based on a set of collaborative filtering, search, and indexing algorithms with the following unique combination of features:

• Delivering relevant product recommendations/results for the consumer.
• Being fast enough to be applicable in real time.
• Following the linear scalability between required computational power and the size of underlying data sets.

The ability to combine all three of the above is vital for the successful application of collaborative filtering to actual eCommerce situations and is what makes Avail technology unique.

The 5%–10% increase in sales you mention in the brochure for Navigation Predictor is quite modest. Can you tell us about the biggest change in sales that you’ve witnessed?

For an online site with a turnover of 9 billion, a 5% to 10% increase is quite substantial. In contrast to most companies in this space, our results are immediate and measurable. In addition to added sales for each basket, we also see dramatic increase in conversion rates. We have customers reporting up to 20% increase in conversion rate, which of course means that Avail really maximizes the value of online visitor traffic to eCommerce sites.

Do you think that being a European vendor gives you any advantages?

It surely does. Some of our US competitors really struggle with language and cultural barriers. Originating from a small, export-oriented country in the outskirts of Europe at least has made us aware and conscious about these issues and has let us prepare both technically and strategically for it.

In short, we claim that our products have the following main competitive differentiating factors:

COMMERCIAL

• The most complete coverage of the entire customer interaction cycle, bridging the gap between search and navigation.
• Immediate, measurable, and success-proven results in terms of conversion rates, average order values, and overall sales revenue.
• Available on purely performance-based terms.

TECHNICAL/IMPLEMENTATION

• Truly relevant behavioral analysis combined with world-class scalability and reliability.
• Outstandingly quick installation (2–3 days) and ease-of-use (no need to touch, but user-friendly GUI available for manual merchandising overriding analysis).
• Platform independence and SOA/Web Delivery architecture.

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